Pat Howard: Waterford authority puts big economic win at risk

Quite a few people have been cheerfully buzzing about baseball as we reached the 20th anniversary this weekend of the first Erie SeaWolves game at Jerry Uht Park.

But in the context of other news from around the region in the past few days, my mind wanders back a little more than a year before the ballpark opened. That's when some Erie City Council members started making noise about screwing up the whole deal over something that had been long settled except as a technicality.

The reason: because they could.

The late Councilman Jim Thompson in particular was willing to put a painstakingly assembled piece of progress at risk over the need to close one block of East Ninth Street to accommodate the ballpark's footprint. He cited fictional opposition from people in nearby neighborhoods.

A major boost for Erie's downtown and sporting scene was good to go on a demanding timeline. All it needed was for local officials to get out of the way.

Fast-forward to Thursday night in Waterford Township, where the inability of another group of public officials to get and keep their stuff together threw a wrench in plans that were all but wired to deliver a major economic win for that part of Erie County. The Waterford Water and Sewer Authority failed, in a 2-2 vote, to approve the 7,000-foot water line extension a Minnesota company needs to resurrect and expand the former Troyer Farms plant to produce snack foods under its Barrel O' Fun brand.

The reason wasn't some technical or environmental problem. It was local turf politics.

KLN Family Brands intends to pay for the work itself, mind you. It just needs the public bodies and officials of Waterford Township and Waterford Borough to agree among themselves.

Whatever the details of the differences that led to Thursday's vote, they should have been long worked out by now. Certainly such local disputes must be dwarfed by the imminent, legitimate prospects for hundreds of good jobs in a part of the county that hasn't exactly been on a winning streak.

It's especially mind-boggling because KLN's move into the region is a clean deal with an established company that's been moving forward on its own dime. Time really is money to such people, and they need local officials to get out of the way.

"Barrel O' Fun East and KLN Family Brands are paying their own way, and have not asked for any handouts, yet still local government can't get this done," company owners Kenny Nelson and Charlie Nelson said in an exasperated statement on Friday. "This situation is especially frustrating when Barrel O' Fun/KLN Family Brands has done everything asked of them."

Compounding the situation was a small-time mistake by the three authority board members who were prepared to form a majority to move the line extension along. One of them missed Thursday's vote because it conflicted with a college class he's taking.

Presumably the three had some idea their two colleagues might not be with them, so they should have ensured that all of them were in the room when the question was called. Then the two supporters who did vote resigned in disgust immediately after, further complicating matters.

It appears the tail is wagging the dog to some degree, because Waterford Township supervisors already have approved the project. A supervisor who came out on the wrong end of that vote, Flory Kondzielski, helped halt things for now on Thursday in his other role as a Water and Sewer Authority member.

Township Supervisor Bruce Coffin said supervisors will hold a special meeting Monday night to explore their legal and parliamentary options for overriding what a minority of authority members have done. But even if this gets worked out, they've still jerked around an outfit that's already investing big and has gone about its business by the numbers.

Such experiences linger.

"Coming into this we thought it would be easy," KLN Waterford plant manager Brian Garlick told reporter Sean McCracken. "It's a 7,000-foot line offered at no cost to the township. So now we're wondering, are we going to have to go through this fight every time we develop the property? It really affects our view on future development."

Maybe this will turn out to be a transitory flap, like Erie City Council's nonsense was on the way to opening day at Jerry Uht Park. But in a day when good jobs are hard to come by in small and rural communities, it seems crazy to tempt fate.

Write to Pat Howard at 205 W. 12th St., Erie, PA 16534, or e-mail him at pat.howard@timesnews.com. Follow him on Twitter at twitter.com/ETNhoward.